“If I were a U.S. citizen I'd vote for Obama for president," said Mariela Castro during her San Francisco conference this week. "I think he is sincere, I think he speaks from the heart." To cheers and applause from the San Franciscan crowd Raul’ Castro’s daughter also proclaimed that, “what we want is the power of emancipation through socialism."

Interesting choice of terms here this “emancipation.” To wit, in 1962 the Soviet satrapy overlorded by Mariela’s family started rationing food to its subjects (in 1958, by the way, Cubans enjoyed the 5rd highest protein consumption in the Western hemisphere.) Under Soviet tutelage Mariela’s uncle Fidel and his toadies decreed that their subjects’ daily food intake would henceforth total: 2 ounces of meat, 3 ounces of rice, and 6.5 ounces of starch and 1 ounce of beans.

Interestingly, back in 1842 the Spanish King had royally decreed daily rations of 8 ounces of meat, 4 ounces of rice, and 16 ounces of starch and 4 ounces of beans for all slaves in the Spanish colony of Cuba.

This means, that Cuba’s literal slaves ate better than Queen Mariela’s “emancipated” subjects—if it were left up to her family’s regime, that is. Fortunately Cuba’s Black Market takes up the considerable slack.

Actually the Castroite-Democratic affinity expressed by Mariela this week is an old story. "We'd better hope Kennedy wins this election," Fidel Castro confided to a subaltern in 1960. "If Nixon wins our revolution won't last." The Bay of Pigs boondoggle, where a Democratic President denied vital support to Cuban Freedom-fighters trying to topple Castro found Fidel nodding smugly. A year later the Missile Crisis “resolution” where JFK pledged the U.S. to protect Cuban Communism, had Castro slapping his knee and high-fiving his Soviet patrons in vindication and glee.

Last year former Democratic president Jimmy Carter thoroughly charmed Mariela’s father and Uncle in Havana. “We greeted each other as old friends,” gushed Carter regarding his meeting with Fidel Castro.

“In 2002, we received him warmly,” reciprocated Castro. “Now, I reiterated to him our respect and esteem."

“Jimmy Carter was the best of all U.S. Presidents,” gushed Raul Castro while seeing his American guest off personally and jovially.

In fact for many prominent Democrats Castro’s Cuba resembles the very Land of Oz, with Cubans laughing the days away—“ha-ha-ha! ho-ho-ho! and a couple of tra-la-las!” If this sounds hyperbolic here’s Conscience of the Democratic Party George Mcgovern after a visit to Cuba in 1975: “Everywhere we were surrounded by laughing children who obviously loved Fidel.”

Here’s the late Frank Mankiewics a lifelong Democratic factotum who served as campaign chairman for Presidential candidate George McGovern, press secretary for Senator Robert Kennedy and as head of NPR from 1977-1983: Mankiewics was greatly impressed by: “The enthusiasm and unity of the Cuban people...they are proud of their accomplishments and sing songs about themselves and their country that reflect this self-pride.”

And lest we forget, Mariela’s uncle Fidel ringingly endorsed Obama the first time around, while greatly fearing for the Democratic candidate’s life. "A profound racism exists in the U.S.," Fidel revealed in an essay dated October 2008. "It's a miracle that the Democratic candidate (Obama) has not suffered the fate of other Americans who dreamed of equality and justice like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King."

For the record: Fidel Castro, forcibly overthrew a black Cuban head of state (Fulgencio Batista) and replaced his government with one where only nine percent of the ruling Stalinist party is black and where the prison population is 80- 90 percent black. He jailed the longest suffering black political prisoner of modern history (Eusebio Penalver who suffered longer in Castro's dungeon's than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa's.) He sentenced other blacks (Dr Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20 year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in a public square.

"(Obama) has a habit of looking at his adversary with serenity and laughing at the verbal gaffes of an opponent who looks blankly into space," continued Castro’s endorsement, where he also denounced McCain as "a habitual liar, who lacks an ethical code and is an instrument of the "Miami Mafia" (i.e. overwhelmingly Republican Cuban-Americans.)

Castro lamented the "brutal measures” the Bush administration had adopted during "the capitalist crisis,” of that time, because these "will provoke more inflation, more devaluation and more loss of markets." A McCain victory would be “economically disastrous,” because, "he was one of the worst students ever at West Point and knew nothing about mathematics, and knows nothing about economic complications."

For the record: Fidel Castro converted a nation with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western hemisphere, a huge influx of immigrants into one that provoked an exodus of 20 per cent of her population against enormous odds and at the cost of their every possession. And this after Castro’s fiefdom was lavished with Soviet subsidies that totaled almost ten Marshall Plans (into a nation of 6.5 million.) This economic feat defies not only the laws of economics but seemingly the very laws of physics.

Actually, Castroites have been associates of Obama's associates for decades. "I have been affiliated with the Cuba Council of Churches since the 1980s," boasted Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a sermon on July 16, 2006. "I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuba Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project's trips to Cuba. The Cuban Council of Churches has been a non-partisan global mission partner for decades. I have worked with them for two decades."

"Non-partisan," Reverend Wright? Not according to Cuban intelligence defector Juan Vives, who from hands-on experience reports that the Cuba Council of Churches is in fact an arm of Cuba's ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos) itself an arm of Cuba's DGI, Cuba's secret police, founded and mentored by the KGB and East German STASI. The ICAP's long-time chieftain was Rene Cruz Rodriguez, perhaps one of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's "friends."

Rodriguez' meteoric rise through Cuba's Stalinist bureaucracy was facilitated by his diligence as an early executioner, often beating out Che Guevara and Raul Castro themselves in his zeal to shatter the firing-squad victim's skull with a coup d' grace from his .45. Here’s dramatic proof of Rene Cruz Rodriguez' zeal as a Castroite officer.